


Pointedly Looking the Other Way

by Brownies96



Series: Good Omens Missing Chapters [8]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 1914-1918, 6000 Years of Pining (Good Omens), Angst, Crowley learns a lesson about starting wars, I studied War poetry for an entire year and not one of my teachers told me they were gay, M/M, Multi, Other, Pre-Slash, Sad, Swearing, World War 1, and for sleeping through 100 years of technological advancement, historically accurate cocktails, horrible histories references, pining from a distance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-24 12:20:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21338146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brownies96/pseuds/Brownies96
Summary: After their fight in 1862, Crowley and Aziraphale have gone seperate ways. Crowley decides to cause trouble on a scale never seen before and Aziraphale tries to convince himself it's all for the best. They're both filled with stupidity and regret.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Wilfred Owen/Siegfried Sassoon
Series: Good Omens Missing Chapters [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1506341
Comments: 3
Kudos: 51





	1. The Cooking Pot of Europe

**Author's Note:**

> this story is short and also rather dark, I mean, WW1 was dark but I just had to go and make it angstier so I’m gonna hopefully make it up to you with this awful joke:
> 
> Why is Europe like a big cooking pot?
> 
> Because it has Greece at the bottom and Turkey in it.
> 
> I’ll see myself out.

28th of June 1914 Sarajevo

Crowley had woken up in no better a mood than he had fallen asleep in. He’d spent the 13 years since he’d woken up messing with the citizens of Europe, deliberately ignoring London. And if he absolutely had to go to London, he gave Soho a wide berth.

Not that he needed to be there a lot, the tensions in Europe were palpable: The treaties, the nationalism, the imperialism, and the new war technologies had brought everything to the brink. Crowley had specific orders: tip it all over.

It had been easy enough to find the group of people to do it. The ‘Black Hand’ thought they were fighting to ‘Make Serbia Great Again’, but really, they were just the schmucks that Crowley knew were stupid enough to try and assassinate the Archduke of Austria, consequences be damned.

They’d already had the plans in place when Crowley had arrived, posing as a sympathiser with the funds to make their goals a reality. When he explained his plan to Hell they hadn’t been very impressed, but the mention of a war had at least gotten him some approval.

“So,” he’d said at his presentation, “Čubrilović will bomb the motorcade as it passes the Mostar Café, then, once the rubble is clear, all of Europe will go to war.”

“Why doezz one Archduke dying mean war in all of Europe?” Beelzebub had demanded.

“Glad you asked, your dark highness. You’ll like this. So, if an Austrian is killed by a Serbian in Bosnia, then Russia will have to get involved because of their treaty with Serbia, and Austria-Hungary will have to step in because of the deliberate attack in one of their territories.”

“Europe isn’t that small, what about the other countries?” Ligur demanded.

“Alright, I’m getting there, so Austria and Germany have an alliance, so Germany will have to get involved, but if Germany gets involved then they’ll be undefended on their Western side, so they’ll have to invade France and Belgium as well, and since England and Belgium have a treaty, that’ll bring England into the mix. So all of Europe will go to war.”

“You really think they’ll all jump in like that over something as little as an assassination?” Ligur said.

“Ligur, mate, of course they will, I’ve been up there for millennia,” Crowley grinned at the crowd, before swaggering off, back up to Bosnia.

The day of the assassination was at hand and Crowley had used all of his demonic wiles to make sure everything was going to go smoothly. Well, not all of them, but some, definitely some. Ok, one. One demonic wile.

He waited for the explosion from the nearby delicatessen. The members of the Black Hand that weren’t out there blowing things up sat in silence, their ears pricked for any sound. Crowley had always found that humans were unbelievably bad at waiting. It was part of what made his job so easy. But these humans seemed especially terrible at it, all sitting around like meerkats being cornered by jackals. Crowley was beginning to thoroughly enjoy their discomfort when he felt it. A miracle.

It wasn’t any old miracle, it filled Crowley with the smell of brioche and the feeling of his gut being punched. Aziraphale was here. He almost didn’t notice the sound of the bomb going off. After all, it was really just a bomb, nothing more than a catalyst and a fuel coming together in a bit of a boom. Feeling Aziraphale’s presence was so much more than that. Simultaneously the best and worst thing he could ever feel in a moment.

“Fuck!” It wasn’t Crowley who spoke (for once), but a young man (what was his name again? Gav-something), who came racing in from the street. “He bombed the wrong fucking car!”

“How did he fuck up that bad?” Came a chorus of voices from the bar.

“I dunno, we planned everything,” the man said, “it would have taken a fucking miracle for anything to go wrong.”

A miracle, of course. Aziraphale was off trying to stop the inevitable, surely he knew that the gunpowder that was Europe had been building for ages, this was just the spark, a spark Crowley would rather have liked to get credit for. But if it wasn’t this assassination it would be another one, or some ship would accidentally sail into someone else’s territory and they’d all go to war. The cooking pot of Europe was boiling over, regardless of what happened. But if Aziraphale really believed he could stop it from happening, well, they’d just have to see about that, wouldn’t they?

“Get your gun,” he told the man.

“What?”

“Get your gun. Wait outside. When you see him, shoot. Or was that too complicated for you to understand?” Crowley hissed. Running through what was supposed to happen next. The plan was supposed to work, he wasn’t supposed to have to remember the rest of the motorcade’s route. Bless it all.

“No, loud and clear,” the man said, obeying Crowley without hesitation, after all, Crowley had been working with them for over a year now, that was plenty of time to cultivate a fearsome reputation.

The waiting returned. Crowley sat on the roof of the deli and watched to motorcade make its way back. The deli wasn’t technically along the route but, oh will you look at that, the driver seemed to get lost. One wrong turn was all it took.

What happened next was obvious enough. It would be written down forever as the cause of the war that followed. In truth, Crowley didn’t understand exactly what he’d started, he’d slept through an entire century of technological advancement, and he had no idea what he’d just unleashed.

* * *

Aziraphale did not like being pulled away from London. London was safe, it had the Gentlemen’s club, which had definitely seen better days (and he would know, he was there), it had the little cafés and restaurants that he loved but couldn’t go to too often because dining alone he stuck out like a sore thumb. It had St James Park and the ducks which he couldn’t look at without worrying about Crowley. Without worrying that he might have found some other way to get his hands on Holy water.

He just had to keep reminding himself that he was right. He shouldn’t even have been speaking to Crowley in the first place. Their entire Arrangement had been a terrible idea, really. An angel and a demon working together, what had made him think that could ever work?

But he had the bookshop. He had his stories and a place that was just his. Well, just his until Gabriel showed up.

“Aziraphale!” Gabriel said, in his tone that just didn’t quite match normal enthusiasm. Gabriel stretched out his arms and raised his eyebrows as if to say, ‘what is this?’.

“Yes Gabriel?” Aziraphale said, feeling his stomach drop. Nothing ever good came from Gabriel making that face.

“We have reliable intel that somethings about to go down in Bosnia, some way to try and start a war or something,” Gabriel gave his tin-like laugh.

“Oh?” Aziraphale said, “What would you like me to do?” This was tricky, Aziraphale always expected Gabriel to tell him to stop wars or floods or natural disasters, but that was seldom the way things actually worked out, all in the name of Her Great Plan.

“The opposition are trying to set it off now. If they want a war to happen then we . . .” Gabriel gestured to Aziraphale like an impatient kindergarten teacher.

“Don’t want it to happen?” Aziraphale offered, wondering how much longer this interaction was going to take.

“Exactly. So close up the shop, and let’s go.” Gabriel said. He only remembered that Aziraphale had to close the shop because last time Gabriel had miracled him anywhere, the shop had been left open and unattended and Aziraphale, who so seldom expressed anger at Gabriel, had explained that leaving the shop unattended like that was incredibly dangerous and could lead to humans discovering far too much.

Aziraphale scrawled a quick note and stuck it to the door, it read, _Family emergency, shop closed until further notice_. He turned the key in the lock and looked expectantly at Gabriel.

The thing about travelling by miracle is that, as well as it drawing quite a bit of power and therefore attention to oneself, it is also both unpleasant and unreliable, especially over long distances. The unreliability can be rectified in one of two ways: by travelling via the source of the power (Heaven or Hell), as it is a great deal easier to aim from above or below; Or by combining multiple sources of power, for example, two angels or two demons.

Gabriel chose the latter, which left Aziraphale feeling rather drained, not that he would ever complain (at least not to Gabriel’s face).

The slightly higher humidity of Sarajevo compared to London should not have been the detail that Aziraphale latched onto, after all he could hear the hopes and prayers of the people all around him. But millennia of being forced to listen to those hopes and prayers, knowing full well that he couldn’t do a thing about them, had led to Aziraphale becoming rather adept at ignoring them.

Of course, the humidity was also something to focus on that wasn’t Crowley. If he just ignored the way Crowley’s scent enveloped the city like a blanket, spiced apple cider over a fire. So he was alive. Aziraphale wasn’t sure if he ought to be pleased about that. It was something of a relief, certainly, that he hadn’t just run off and crashed the nearest baptism. But he wasn’t supposed to care at all. Gabriel would have handed over Holy water in a second and would have returned to Heaven to happily report one less demon in the world. But then again, Gabriel wouldn’t have let himself get roped into the Arrangement in the first place. Well, that was putting it a tad strongly, he’d participated in the Arrangement as much as Crowley had, but never again. He was on the straight (well, sort of) and narrow.

Aziraphale miraculously managed to find a place on one of the bridges over the Miljacka River and settled in place to watch some kind of procession. One of these days he was going to find a way to make Gabriel give him more specific instructions. He was just beginning to think about looking for Crowley when he heard a prayer from the banks of the river.

_Please, God, let this work_

He focused on the voice and saw a man toss something at the cars, aiming right for the car that contained the Archduke of Austro-Hungarian Empire. Oh yes, that would set off mayhem. It would be such a shame if someone were to divert the bomb, alerting security to the threat, but without the risk of war. Such a shame indeed.

The bomb went off under the next car, wounding, but not fatally, about 20 people.

Aziraphale was just getting ready to congratulate himself on a job well done. He’d noticed a café selling Burek, a sort of flaky pastry filled with meat, cheese, or other things, and had decided he’d quite like to try it when he felt it, a demonic miracle.

He pushed his way through the streets before remembering he could miraculously clear his path. He could feel something else too, people praying for safety from a merciful God. He hoped She was listening.

He heard it before he saw anything. Humans, with their fast inventions, had created the devices that could bring death with a bang. There were two loud cracks before the shooter was pinned by security.

One car. Two bodies. A chorus of assassins being wrestled to the ground. But it was too late. Aziraphale looked up at the roof of the deli, just in time to see Crowley disappear.

Darn.


	2. The Eternal Reciprocity of Tears

13th of November 1918

“7 more days,” The man said, his face contorting in pain against the wall of the bookshop, “That’s all it would have taken, 7 more days and he would have lived.”

“I know, Mr Sassoon,” Aziraphale replied, patting the man’s pack in sympathy. “Please, sit down, tell me why you have come here.”

“I just couldn’t-“ Mr Sassoon said, still wrapped in a shroud of grief, “I can’t let them forget him.”

“How can I help?” Aziraphale wasn’t sure how much he could do, as far as this man was concerned, he was simply a bookseller and purveyor of rare manuscripts.

Siegfried Sassoon pulled a handful of pages out of a tattered standard-issue military satchel. “He wrote,” the man said, clearly working hard to speak rather than scream, “better than I ever did, despite what he said.”

Aziraphale pulled the manuscripts away and leafed through the pages, line after line spoke to him, reminding him of the agony these past four years had caused humanity.

“Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;/Whatever shares/The eternal reciprocity of tears.” Aziraphale read aloud, whoever this writer had been, he had understood in just four years what had taken Aziraphale several lifetimes.

“Tell me about him,” Aziraphale said, piecing together the manuscripts.

“Will was unlike anybody else,” Siegfried said, “we met at Craiglockhart, shellshock and all that, and it was like he could see everything about me. We started writing together and we stayed in contact during the war. I got the telegram telling me-“ his eyes filled with tears once again, “Everyone was sure the war was ending, we were supposed to be free soon, he was supposed to come home.”

Aziraphale could feel it, no matter how much Mr Sassoon tried to hide it, those pangs of love overshadowed by heartbreak. “You don’t have to hide it here,” Aziraphale whispered to him, “love is never wrong no matter what other people believe.”

“I was too scared back then,” Siegfried admitted, wrapping his hands over one another, “I was convinced that we couldn’t even be friends, it was too dangerous. But he whittled me down. He told me- told me that I’d fixed his life, however short it may be. And he kept going and going. And I stopped him every time, with some reason, some fear. And now he’s gone and I never got to tell him that I-“ Sassoon didn’t get the rest of it out, but Aziraphale understood what he meant. Some combination of these heartbroken words and the words written on pages by the now-dead Wilfred Owen had Aziraphale’s own eyes watering.

“I have a few contacts with some publishers,” Aziraphale said, “but you must publish your own work as well, if nothing else,” Aziraphale broke off for a moment as Siegfried looked at him and the despair in his eyes was almost overwhelming, “so your work can stay together. I can see in his notes that he thought very highly of your writing, I think he’d be furious with me if I didn’t tell you to publish your own work as well.”

Sassoon nodded slowly and reached into his bag one more time and handed Aziraphale a pile of letters. “Mr Fell, you- you know what these are. They have to be destroyed, but I can’t do it.”

“No, no dear boy, they don’t need to be destroyed. But I’ll keep them safe, somewhere no one will find them.” Aziraphale couldn’t destroy anything of such literary significance, nor so coated with love.

“You’re sure?”

“I promise,” Aziraphale said. He wanted to offer some piece of divine wisdom, but he had none to give, and even if he did, divine wisdom was so often offensive where it was meant to be helpful, it was just so far removed from real suffering. Aziraphale could still remember Thera and how Crowley had reacted after that terrible volcano. So instead of divine wisdom, he offered very human companionship, he found Siegfried a handkerchief that he was happy to part with (happy might have been an exaggeration, but he could bear it), and patted the poor man on the back comfortingly.

Aziraphale’s bookshop had been rather abandoned during the war. That wasn’t to say he hadn’t been there, just that it had been closed for business while “A.Z. Fell” was enlisted in the army. And he had gone to a few of the battles, but after Passchendaele, it had just become too painful to watch. They were little more than children, Her children, and they were slaughtering each other for reasons they didn’t understand.

They were calling it ‘The War to End All Wars’ but Aziraphale knew this to be false, for starters, there was Armageddon, the End, where Heaven and Hell would do glorious battle. It would be nice if Aziraphale could believe that this was the last of humanity’s wars, though. But he wouldn’t hold his breath, and he didn’t even need to breathe.

For a moment, Aziraphale felt a pang of heartbreak and wondered if Sassoon had returned, but almost as soon as he’d felt it, it passed, the faintest smell of blackberries in its wake. Aziraphale wondered if that was just what heartbreak tasted like, blackberries.

* * *

“Gimme something strong.”

“Victory cocktails are half price this week, in celebration of the armistice,” the girl behind the bar said, smiling.

“Sure,” Crowley said, not particularly caring either way. It didn’t matter, anyway. There was nothing he could do. He had been the most celebrated demon in Hell for over four years and he’d spent every second of it wishing he could erase everything he’d seen from his mind though sheer force of will. Or alcohol, alcohol was a good second option.

He’d seen so much suffering on Earth that it had almost become a second Hell: The damp, the explosions, the meaningless killings. It reminded him of the Spanish Inquisition, of St Bartholomew’s Day, but of course, they’d been different, they’d been better. They’d had Aziraphale.

Sometimes, he wondered what would happen if he just went to the bookshop and apologised. But that was stupid.

“Aziraphale I’m sorry I asked too much of you, but I need your help, I need to make this stop-“

And Aziraphale would . . . do something, he was so hard to predict. Crowley could almost hear him saying, “Crowley, I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do, we’re on opposing sides, it was a mistake to ever have helped you and I will not be restarting now.” Crowley wasn’t sure he could handle that kind of rejection.

But somewhere, deep down, he hoped his angel would be different. More different that he already, wonderfully, was. He hoped that one day, maybe in another six-thousand years, Aziraphale would talk to him again, would shelter him again. They could share a French 75 or one of the other alcoholic inventions that had come out of this shitshow (Crowley could claim authorship of quite a few of them).

He sipped his victory cocktail, bourbon, Chambord, bitters, vanilla syrup, and blackberries. It was good. Aziraphale would have liked it. The bar wasn’t that far from Soho, maybe he’d try it someday. Probably not with Crowley though.

Technically, it wasn’t bar policy to allow patrons to leave with cocktails in hand, but policies were something that happened to other people. Outside, it was like all of London was breathing a sigh of relief. Rationing would be over soon and everything they had done without would be back. The survivors of the Western Front would return and even though life would never go back to the way it was before, it would be better than it had been.

Crowley walked about in something of a stupor, he wasn’t really _that_ drunk, but it was easier to just act on the impulses his alcoholic brain sent to him, rather than to try and mine beneath it to find his sober thoughts.

It should come as no surprise that Crowley found himself outside the bookshop. He looked in the window and saw Aziraphale sitting at his desk, reading over something or another. He looked so peaceful, surrounded by his collections of books and scrolls and anything else anyone had ever written on. The thought of trying to speak to Aziraphale, trying to apologise, once again popped unwelcome into his mind.

He couldn’t stay. It hurt too much.

In his stupor and heartbreak, he forgot to miracle his drink away with him. Without a limb holding it up, it shattered on the doorstep.


End file.
